Ode to a Nightingale. John Keats

the bards who sung

       In other ages — cold and sacred busts

       Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts

       To clear Futurity his darling fame!

       Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim

       At swelling apples with a frisky leap

       And reaching fingers, ‘mid a luscious heap

       Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane

       Of liny marble, and thereto a train

       Of nymphs approaching fairly o’er the sward:

       One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward

       The dazzling sunrise: two sisters sweet

       Bending their graceful figures till they meet

       Over the trippings of a little child:

       And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild

       Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.

       See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping

       Cherishingly Diana’s timorous limbs; —

       A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims

       At the bath’s edge, and keeps a gentle motion

       With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean

       Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o’er

       Its rocky marge, and balances once more

       The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam

       Feel all about their undulating home…

       Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,

       Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean

       His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!

       For over them was seen a free display

       Of outspread wings, and from between them shone

       The face of Poesy: from off her throne

       She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell.

      It is easy from the above and from some of Keats’ later work to guess at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt’s walls and in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards: — Poussin’s ‘Empire of Flora’ for certain: several, probably, of his various ‘Bacchanals,’ with the god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or left: the same artist’s ‘Venus and Adonis’: Stothard’s ‘Bathers’ and ‘Vintage,’ his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura and her friend; Raphael’s ‘Poetry’ from the Vatican; and so forth. These things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration from works of art, — prints, pictures, or marbles, — that came under his notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to

      — the pleasant flow

      Of words on opening a portfolio.

      A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to mention briefly or not at all, — how such and such a descriptive phrase in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation of the Grecian Urn.

      On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the Examiner on ‘Young Poets,’ in which the names of Shelley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the Cricket:— ‘The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line: —

      The poetry of earth is never dead.

       “Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines: —

       On a lone winter morning, when the frost

       Hath wrought a silence —

      “Ah that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!” And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season’s suspension and torpidity.’ The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another’s company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves ‘after the manner of the elder bards.’ Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in — conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, ‘in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,’ and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted. Here are Hunt’s pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed: —

      A crown of ivy! I submit my head

      To the young hand that gives it, — young, ’tis true,

       But with a right, for ’tis a poet’s too.

       How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread

       With their broad angles, like a nodding shed

       Over both eyes! and how complete and new,

       As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew

       My sense with freshness, — Fancy’s rustling bed!

       Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes

       Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,

       And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old

       Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes, —

       And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,

       Bacchus, — whose bride has of his hand fast hold.

       It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,

       Thus to be topped with leaves; — to have a sense

       Of honour-shaded thought, — an influence

       As from great Nature’s fingers, and be twined

       With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,

       As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence

       A head that bows to her benevolence,

       Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.

       ’Tis what’s within us crowned. And kind and great

       Are all the conquering wishes it inspires, —

       Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,

       Love of love’s self, and ardour for a state

       Of natural good befitting such desires,

       Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

      Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest: —

      ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

      Minutes